I'd like to invite you to participate in the Drupal.org survey. The objective of this survey is to get feedback on the Drupal.org website, and to prioritize the work we should put into improving Drupal.org. The survey will run for about one week, and the results of the survey will be published in 2-3 weeks. Preliminary results will be presented at the Drupal conference in Amsterdam. Thanks for your support.

Day 1

Easy set up - Dikini (Vladimir Zlatanov) brought his laptop, pre-installed with Drupal 4.6 and HEAD, so we could do demonstrations. Thanks to Multiman (Peter Brownell) we had a projector, and we were able to draw quite a lot of attention with a rolling screen-shot slide show of prominent Drupal sites.

There were a lot of visitors through out the day, mostly a mixture of people asking what Drupal was (intrigued by the logo on the poster and the slideshow), asking how it differed from Mambo, or telling us they used Drupal and how much it rocks!

It’s been hectic here, as is evidence by our late release. But don’t worry; we think you’ll find it’s worth it. We’ve also got a new newsletter management system powered by the simplenews module. We hope you’ll enjoy the new look.

Speaking of late, the freeze that was scheduled for last month still hasn’t happened, apparently as the lead developers wait for more cool stuff to get into the release. Let’s hope they get it done soon.

A major vulnerability was also found in flexinode module. Please go to http://drupal.org/node/32940 to see if you are affected. Don’t forget to subscribe to the security announcements mailing list to receive the latest updates http://drupal.org/security .

In other news, Neil Drumm has left CivicSpace Labs. In an email sent on Monday Neil said “The CivicSpace development team under Kieran's leadership is doing quite well and will continue to produce good software without me.” We hope all goes well with you Neil and best of luck in your new haunts!

Well, I don’t want to keep you from this month’s issue any longer, let’s begin!
Robin Monks,
Editor

There have been several posts lately surrounding the quality of search results with Drupal's built-in search engine, and how it can be difficult to find targeted results on Drupal.org as a result.

The great news is that our very own Steven has been developing a patch to drastically improve advanced searches by adding a number of features, including filtering results by node type (page, blog, etc.), specifically excluding certain words/phrases, and so on. All it needs now are some people to test it and give feedback.

And the really great news is that YOU can help! Even if you know nothing of foreign terms like "patches" or "CVS," as long as you can install Drupal, YOU can help to test this addition and get it added to Drupal (and thus Drupal.org) faster!

This is to announce the formal creation of a Security Team for Drupal that will be lead by Karoly Negyesi (chx). Karoly has been actively contributing code, support and documentation on Drupal for the last one and a half year and has been a strong proponent for setting up a formal security team.

As many of you know, we have been working on building out and extending the infrastruture of Drupal.org to handle additional things that will help our community grow. To that end, I setup a security announcement newsletter, a history of all security advisories (empty for now, we have yet to migrate the old advisories), and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories.

If you setup or adminsiter Drupal sites, we strongly advise you to sign up for the list. To subscribe to the security announcement mailing list, visit the security page or check the newsletter settings under my account >> edit >> my newsletters.

I upgraded drupal.org to the latest development version of Drupal and installed simplenews, a newsletter module for Drupal written by DriesK. I migrated the Drupal newsletter from Mailman to Drupal. You can now manage your newsletter subscriptions from your personal user page, or you could subscribe to the Drupal newsletter's RSS feed. Also, publishing the newsletter on the web has never been easier so no more delays for the web version of the newsletter. In future, both the e-mail version and the web version could, and probably will, go out at the same time.